What Comes First, Depression or Addiction?

How well do you know the Wizard of Oz? Chances are you remember that Dorothy is accompanied by the Lion, Tin Man and Scarecrow, but do you remember which one she meets first? Does the Lion help to bring the Tin Man to life? Was it the Scarecrow who tempted the Lion from the forest? Sequence is essential to the story.

Similarly, our life stories develop around causes and effects. You could probably guess that risky sexual behaviors, substance abuse, and depression go together. But which of these lions, tigers and bears are causes and which are the results?

It may seem like a silly question: if risky sex, drugs and depression all eventually tend to get mashed up together, who cares which one comes first? But in fact, this is one of the most important questions in substance abuse treatment and recovery. Think of it like the relationship between heart disease and chest pain: if you treat the pain instead of the underlying cause of heart disease, the pain will come back again and again.

What if, as popular opinion holds, depression is a cause of substance abuse? Do depressed people "self-medicate" with sex or substances in order to feel better, only to find themselves eventually addicted? In that case, treating the substance abuse by itself is like treating chest pain – eventually depression will bring back the symptom of addiction, and the individual will relapse again and again.

Now imagine addiction is the cause and depression is the symptom. In this case, treating addiction kills both birds with one stone – with the cause of addiction gone, so is the symptom of depression. Sure there's some grey area here. For example, maybe it's impossible to treat depression until an addiction is under control. But the heart of the question remains: what is at the root of this combination of challenges you wouldn't wish on the wickedest witch?

The answer comes from a study of 18,924 teenagers, the population in which so many of these challenges start. Which teenagers abstained, who experimented, and who were heavy users? Who was depressed? And how did these behaviors change when measured one year and again the next?

It turns out that teens who experiment with sex and drugs are likely to be depressed a year later. But teens who are depressed are no more likely to have experimented with risky sex and drugs the next year. So much for self-medicating the symptoms of depression; instead, it seems that risky behaviors come first and depression follows.

However, beyond this important headline, the results get trickier. For example, both experimenting and heavy-use of drugs and/or sex among girls led to depression. But among boys, it was only heavy using that increased depression a year later—for some reason, these boys were more resilient to experimentation than girls. And in drug-abstaining girls, depression made them even less likely to experiment a year later, but in girls who were already experimenting, depression made them more likely to transition into heavy use—as if depression further insulated abstainers from temptation and tipped experimenters over a self-destructive cliff.

Of course there are people who buck the trend. There are many individuals who are depressed first and find substance abuse or risky sex second. And there are people with at-risk or even heavy-use behaviors who never become depressed.

The truth is, despite what science shows is usually the case we can rarely know with certainty at the onset of treatment what triggers depression, substance abuse, and risky sexual behavior. And it’s not worth guessing which is the chicken and which is the egg—the consequences are too extreme. Instead, when presented with co-occurring disorders, we find it’s best to treat each as a cause, and treat each psychological and psychiatric disorder concurrently with addiction. Only by peeling back the layers of symptoms until discovering the causes of risky, destructive and terrifying behaviors, can we treat these issues in a way that is truly long-lasting.

Boredom may be an issue, AZWarrior, but the greater problem is loneliness. In research on substance abuse among the elderly, loneliness is both a self-identified and observed problem that leads to substance abuse, particularly excessive drinking.

I began suffering from depression by age 12 (maybe a bit younger), I took my first drink at age 17 in the middle of a crushing depression that left me unable to get out of bed some days. I got drunk to feel better for a while. I wanted relief. I chased that relief for the next 10 years. When I would end up in psych wards back then they said that depressed people did not drink, so I had to be bi-polar, so they treated me for the wrong problem and I continued to drink. Then I got into "recovery" and was told that I was depressed because alcohol was a depressant and that when I was a kid I was just a "pre-alcoholic" not depressed. Mumbo-jumbo is what I have gotten from recovery systems and mental health systems until just a few years ago. I stayed sober and suffering from depression for many years until I became brave enough to seek help for my mental health again. Finally I received proper treatment.

My advice to anyone suffering from depression is NEVER drink alcohol or you will not get real, lasting mental healthcare. People who self-medicate get shuffled off to the "get right with God" system, belittled, and forgotten.

I'm curious to know what help Mini-vans make me ill eventually received that worked? His story sounds very familiar to my son's. Who has gone to the hospital numerous times, but refuses treatment and instead chooses to self medicate.

I was finally diagnosed with General Anxiety Disorder, OCD, and Depression. I have been given medication that works for both my anxiety and depression. Mainly effexor. I did get sober, but continued to suffer from my mental health problems for another 17 years until I decided that I would seek professional help.

Thank you for the most accurate description of getting 'shuffled off to the get right with god system, belittled and forgotten'. That is because addiction has been labeled a 'disease' rather than the learning disorder it is. People deserve real help and not faith healing disguised as medicine.

I agree that boredom comes before depression because boredom can also be linked with loneliness. I think coping well with these situations begins in your relationship with your parents in infancy, so those of us with insensitive caregivers in childhood have to do the very hard work of learning to deal with these things as adults, ugh!!

Mini-vans' story shares a sad truth that often times physicians, and even some mental health professionals, do not have proper training in the most up-to-date treatment strategies for addiction or depression. Even now, many addiction treatment centers will not treat depression or other co-occurring psychiatric disorders and psychiatric hospitals are ill-equipped to treat depression. Further, many medications either show no real efficacy in treating depression or may worsen addiction. It's a real problem with our health care system.

If you look at the blog on my treatment center's website, http://www.cliffsidemalibu.com/blog/, you will find that frequently Dr. Scharff, our Director of Addiction Research, writes about depression and addiction. What we've found is that both must be treated concurrently. The very best long-term treatment is intensive one-on-one psychotherapy, to get at the root causes of the addiction. In conjunction with this, we also provide therapies that include acupuncture, meditation, massage, yoga, proper nutrition, and exercise. These complementary practices help lift the symptoms of depression so that the psychological work can continue at its highest level. There's no quick fix for treating depression and addiction, but both can be done.

I'm glad you finally found the help that you needed, Mini-van. Your story stands as a testament that we need to do more to help those with dual-diagnoses.